Making Coffee
"One for the pot" and a heaping table-spoon of ground coffee for each person, is the usual allowance. Mix well, either with a part or the whole of an egg (or codfish skin, washed, dried, and cut in inch pieces, may be used instead of egg), and enough cold water to thoroughly moisten it, place in a well-scalded coffee-boiler, pour in half the quantity of boiling water needed, allowing one pint less of water than there are table-spoons of coffee. Roll a cloth tightly and stop up the nose or spout, thus keeping in all the coffee flavor. Boil rather fast five minutes, stirring down from the top and sides as it boils up, and place on back part of stove or range where it will only simmer for ten or fifteen minutes longer. When ready to serve add the remainder of the boiling water. Or, another method of making coffee without clearing, is to stir the coffee directly into the boiling water, boil and simmer as above, then pour out a large cupful, and, holding it high over the pot, pour it in again; repeat this, and set it on stove where it will keep hot, without simmering. The coffee will be clear, if instructions are carefully followed. Coffee boiled a long time is strong, but not so well flavored or agreeable as when prepared as above.
To keep the coffee-pot or tea-pot thoroughly pure, boil a little borax in them, in water enough to touch the whole inside surface, once or twice a week, for about fifteen minutes. No dish-water should ever touch the inside of either. It is sufficient to rinse them in two or three waters; this should be done as soon after they are used as possible; drain dry, and when ready to use scald out in two waters. These precautions will aid in preserving the flavor of the tea and coffee. In selecting coffee, choose that which is dry and light; if it feels dense and heavy it is green.
This is boiled coffee, the American standard before percolators and drip cones took over, and it depends on egg protein to drag the grounds out of suspension. A few of the instructions are worth reading twice before you commit a pot to them.
- The water quantity is unclearThe water quantity looks wrong to a modern palate -- "one pint less of water than there are table-spoons of coffee" gives, for eight heaping spoons, seven pints, far weaker than modern practice by any common measure. Either the tablespoons were much more heaping than we would allow or the ratio is a printer's slip; treat it as unreliable and work from your own strength preference.
- Grind coarseBoiled coffee needs a coarse, even grind, roughly what you would use for a French press. Anything fine will pass through the egg raft and cloud the cup no matter how carefully the rest is followed.
- What the egg doesEgg protein coagulates in the hot coffee and binds the suspended fines into a raft that sinks. Codfish skin, offered here as a substitute, is rich in collagen and would work on a similar principle; it was presumably the cheaper option where an egg was worth keeping.
- Skip plugging the spoutStopping the nose with a rolled cloth on a pot boiling fast only blocks one vent for steam and invites spitting when it works loose; leave the spout open and cover the pot instead.
- The total boiling time is the real problemFive minutes at a fast boil plus ten to fifteen minutes simmering is well past the point where coffee turns bitter and flat — the book half-admits it in the line about long-boiled coffee. Bring it just to the boil, take it off the heat, and give it four or five minutes to settle.
- Do not use the boraxBoiling borax in a coffee pot was ordinary Victorian housekeeping, but sodium borate is no longer treated as a food-contact cleaner and is not permitted as a food additive in the US or the EU. Hot water and a soft brush, with a periodic soak in a proprietary coffee-equipment cleaner, does the same job on coffee oils.
- "Green" means unroastedThe closing note on choosing coffee that is "dry and light" rather than "dense and heavy" refers to whole beans sold raw or partly roasted, as they usually were then. Roasted beans lose water and become less dense, so weight in the hand was a rough test of roast.
- YieldAs written the method scales by the drinker — one heaping spoon each plus one for the pot — so it fits any number. Serve straight from the pot without stirring, so as not to lift the settled grounds.
Buckeye Cookery came out of an Ohio Methodist parsonage-fund committee in 1877, and its coffee instructions describe the everyday American method of the century: grounds boiled in a tin pot, cleared with egg. Clarifying a liquid with egg white is much older than coffee in the West, where it was used for wine — and it was carried over to coffee because the tinware pots of the period had no filter of any kind. The book's advice on selecting beans is a reminder that green coffee was still commonly bought by the pound and roasted at home in a skillet or a drum roaster set in the stove hole; commercially roasted, sealed, ground coffee was only beginning to displace that habit in the 1870s and 1880s. The codfish-skin substitute, and the borax regimen for the pot, both belong to a kitchen where an egg had a cash value and where tinned vessels picked up rancid coffee oils fast.